Lecture 7: “Brain Research / Knowing What We Know, Knowing What They Know”
Today, I want to share with you some of the specific notation from brain research that should influence the way you act as teachers, and the way I act as a teacher. Most of this material comes directly from a book called, Brain Based Learning by Eric Jensen.
I want to emphasize the fact that a lot of brain research is moving so fast that a lot of it is controversial. In other words, we really don't know what the brain research tells you. For example there is brain research that suggests that you learn more from voluntary physical exercise than from involuntary exercise, but you learn more from involuntary exercise than you learn from no exercise. In other words the brain research says that the more exercise you have that is voluntary, the better that will physiology alter your brain and your capacity for learning.
Isn't that a pretty powerful finding? So sitting around being a couch potato is depriving your brain of the opportunities to grow and develop in ways that help you learn. That sounds pretty exiting and you know I am all in favor of exercise. But when you looked at what the research was on which that finding was based, you have to get a little nervous, or I get a little nervous because that brain research was done with rats.
They had three groups of rats, one group was pinned up not able to have any exercise, one group had nice cages with running things like treadmills to use any time they wanted to. The most interesting ones though were the involuntary exercise rats. If you were a rat researcher how would you organize rats to have involuntary activities? I suppose you could put them on a treadmill where they couldn't get off, and they would have to keep running to catch up. That would be one kind of involuntary exercise. But that's not what they did. These researchers took the rats once or twice a day and dumped them into a pool of water so they had to swim to shore.
After the rats died, they looked at their brain structures. The rats that sat around all the time had the least well-developed brains. In other words, they didn't have the potential to think as much as the rats that were dumped in the water and had to swim to shore. Those rats and more developed brains. But the brains of the rats that had voluntary exercise were developed most of all. There were actually more neural connections, in other words potential thinking power.
The way you measure potential thinking power in the brain is to look at the actual number of neuro-connections there are. It turns out the brain is like a muscle. The more you use the muscle, the brain, and the more neuro-connections there are. In other words, if you don't use your brain very much when you are a little kid, when you get to be an adult you don't have a powerful brain to think with.
We used to think that some kids were genetically inferior because their IQ scores and stuff like just weren't that high. Now we are starting to believe it is because they were raised in deprived environments. It may mean that during the crucial area of growth they didn't have the kind of stimulus experience that allows their brain to grow and function. But still, no one knows whether or not this that involuntary/ voluntary exercise brain research from rats will hold up with humans or not.
A lot of rat research that we accept as the bases for psychology and a lot of the stuff we believe to be true in psychology comes from brain research. Isn't anything particularly unusual that we would now start getting a lot of stuff from brain research that may impact or suggest qualities of the neurology of learning? That's the way we learn, that's the way we learn about learning. In some ways you have to understand that everything I say this morning, which represents not so much my personal biases, although I happen to agree with them, but the source of my bias this morning comes from Eric Jensen. If you want to check this out more, get the book Brain Bases Learning because that is where most of this is coming from. It's controversial; there are folks who don't come to the same conclusions that Mr. Jensen comes to.
However, his book is well documented, and he acknowledges that at least some of the theories are controversial. I'm sure there are others that are equally controversial, and he just doesn't recognize them. I mention all of this, because it is important to recognize that learning is all a matter of bias and perception. There is no such thing as objective knowledge. Certainly this is true in a field like brain research that is moving like a steam engine going down a track that nobody is in charge of. You can't expect everyone in the field, or in education, to be "up to date," or very thoroughly organized. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to understand it, even as it is being developed. The old idea that until you have something mastered, you should just ignore it, doesn't work And the reason is this: most of what we do now in the classroom, we do based on all kinds of non-evidence. We just do it because traditionally that's how it's been done. That is just terrible. It is better to follow scientific evidence that is not entirely confirmed, rather than follow no evidence at all.
Now, one of the things that is very clear, (there doesn't seem to be any controversy at all) is that the brain is not linear. What does that mean? The brain operates on many paths simultaneously. That is the brain gets many inputs at once. Here you are sitting reading my lecture, right, but you are also listening to noises around you, feeling the chair underneath you, perhaps smelling things too. All kinds of stuff is happening.
We fool ourselves into thinking that when we go to a movie, we just watch a movie. But as we watch there are all sorts of things happening around us, like the whispering of other people, that we tend to screen out and pretend we are only getting stuff from one source: the screen. That just isn't true. We're actually getting it from many paths, or many modalities at once. Kinetics, or feeling, is one modality, sight is a modality, hearing is a modality, smelling is a modality. All these modalities bring stimulus, and each one is processed on a different level of consciousness. We get all sort of stuff, and process it, that we're not aware of, because it is dealt with on different levels of consciousness.
Anytime we try to reduce things to a linear processing, any time we try to pretend things are going one at a time in a row, we are reducing understanding. That means anytime a teacher says, "this is the way," that's a linear type of processing. Or anything that pretends we are going to do things one at a time or in order is linear processing. That is going to reduce understanding, not increase understanding.
One of the metaphors used is that our brain likes to make great music. Think of a jazz quartet. What is it about a jazz quartet that makes it great? It is the blend of music improvisation. It's a matter of the way the four musicians play off each other. Each of these personalities is playing their own version independently. Great jazz is a blend of these different voices. If you think of our brain, and its liking to make great music and improvising, making it up as it goes along, hearing different voices from different directions, then that is one of the images of the way we probably really learn. We don't just learn bing bing bing, from a script. We learn from everything that is going on.
What do you do with that as a teacher? I don't know. We are just barely learning what it is, not how it will work. We just don't know how it will work. We are just really struggling with that. But what does that say? It says we have to both be a bit humble in terms on the way we go about things, and it also means we should be constantly be trying new ways and new patterns. We are so unlikely to have the correct form it is ridiculous.
Our brain is a parallel processor, where parallel processing means that you can do more than one task at once. Some of the new computers, you can be receiving email in the background, while you are printing, while you are doing ten different things at once. If the computer is strong enough you can do all these things, and not even notice the other things are going on because the machine does them simultaneously and in the background. To understand the level of how massive the brain's parallel processing capacity is, consider this.
If you take one eye you have million of axons in it. Each of those axons feed into the brain simultaneously. The eye doesn't put it all together and send it to the brain. And of course there are two eyes, so that is millions and millions of simultaneous images driving into the brain. For the brain to figure out whatever it is figuring out visually, it has to be processing a million parallel processing events in each eye simultaneously. And that is just to see, the most basic and taken for granted of our brain functions.
Think of the way we learn about the city. Hopefully you can remember a time when you walked into a new city for the first time. The first way many people learn about a city when they visit it is by reading a guidebook. Perhaps you did something like that when you first came to ODU's campus. Now compare how much you actually know about your city, or ODU, which what you learned that first time when you read the book. How much did you learn from that process? Not very much. Your experience of a city is completely different than the abstraction you get reading somebody's description of it. Contrast that with the way classrooms are organized. Classrooms are organized to present things one at a time. We know that the brain can process millions of things simultaneously. We know that when it does, like the first time you walk into a city, then you learn on much deeper and richer levels. So where do we get this notation that we are better off trying to present just one thing? This is probably one of the most destructive misconceptions of how we learn.
Brain researchers do the darndest things. That is the nature of research; you have to look at simple things before you start understanding bigger things. There are some brain researchers that figure out what parts of the brain you use when you figure out how to cross the street. That sounds pretty mundane; here I am about to step off the curb, and some brain is trying to figure out what I am using in my brain to help me cross the street. But the interesting thing is that they found that even in a simple exercise like crossing the street, we use five different areas of the brain. Watching for visual pattern, movement, shape, velocity, sounds and feelings. When I get ready to cross the street, I don't say, number 1 what is the visual pattern? Number 2 what is the movement? Number 3 what shapes am I dealing with? Number 4 what speeds are these coming in? The light pole is coming at me in a different speed than the car. I have to take this into account, I don't dodge the light pole the same way I dodge the car. So I am taking into account velocity. The sounds and feelings, how am I feeling about this, if I am all nervous and frightened I respond to it differently then if I am confident. All this happens subconsciously.
You've seen in movies, the hero always manages to dash across absolutely clogged intersections, nimbly dogging all the cars and making it to the other side, and the bad guy gets trapped. That's because the bad guy doesn't have the same kind of processing abilities as the hero does. We tend to assume that our students are short of those processing abilities in our teaching environment. Here the average 15-year-old has no problem crossing the street, but the average 15-year-old gets stuck in class, why? Brain researchers say the reasons why the average 15 year old can get stuck in class is because we are trying to get that 15 year old to behave contrary to what the brain of the 15 year old is telling him or her is the right way to behave.
The total number of connections that the brain can make is unknown. It's now known (if someone wants to count them) that the brain has 100 billion brain cells. But the number of connections is not known. The lowest number of connections that is estimated is 10 to the 14th power. 10 with 14 zeros after it. Most argued that it is 10 to the 80th power, to as many as 10 to the 100th power. I don't know whether it makes a difference if it is 10 with 80 zeros, or 800 zeros. But to get an idea, consider this: the number of atoms in the known universe, not just on earth, is only 10 to the 80th power.
Each brain is unique. There aren't two brains ever, anywhere that are absolutely alike. There are 30 interconnected brain centers and each of those brain centers has it's own map. Some years ago we didn't know the brain had 30 different centers, but now we know, but we don't really know what goes on in each one. All we are finding out is the more we learn, the more we know we don't know.
Then there are some weird things we are finding out, some at a gross level. Did you know that Einstein's brain was fished out of his head before they buried him? Because they thought it would be cool to study his brain. Of course when Einstein died they didn't have a lot of abilities to know what they were doing. One of the big statistics about Einstein's brain is that it wasn't bigger than anybody else's brain. They fished the brain of a literary guy, named Balzac; they fished the brain out of his head. His brain was 40 percent lager then Einstein. We are guessing the size of the brain may not be all that important, or at least not at this stage of our development.
Then it turns out that the brain can mature at different rates than the body. Chronology there may be as much as three years difference in brain maturation rate then there is in physical rate. In a class of five year olds, some maybe thinking as 8 years old, and others as 2 year olds. I am not talking about special Ed; I'm talking about the average brain. Between two normal people, you may have a huge difference in the brain readiness to learn. Therefore holding all students of the same age to the same standards is unfair, some brains just aren't ready to deal with that.
Differing rates of maturity of the brain is a different thing than the ultimate power of the brain. Your brain may be slow to get there, but when it gets there it may be more powerful than a brain that gets there faster. If you take a slow maturing brain, and you keep knocking on the kid because he/she is "stupid" what you may be doing is ultimately limiting the power of the brain to function, when it could have functioned just fine or even better if we had understood this. We have many learners on many timetables.
Left/Right, Girl/Boy, Thinking/Non-thinking Brains
This left-brain right brain stuff is driving everybody crazy. We used to think that the left-brain, (which is the sequential processing side of the brain), does language and stuff, and the right side, (which is the random processing side of the brain), does visual stuff. We now learn it doesn't happen that way. We are finding so many things we can't understand. For example, in the U.S. about 10 % of the pop. is left handed, (like me) while 90% are right handed. It turns out that the world that these right-handers have created is very prejudicial to us left-handers. So prejudicial, in fact, that left-handers are five times as likely as right-handers to die an accidental death. The world is organized to protect you right-handers, not organized to protect me.
The old idea was that music is a right brain activity, but when you have a musician listen to music, he/she will process music dominantly on the left side of the brain. Only musical novices process music in the right side of the brain. This is because when musicians hear music they analyze it. For a novice you just kind of lay back and randomly process.
There a sex differences, there seems to be pretty solid neurological evidence, that females brain process language and feelings at the same time, and more efficiently than male brains. Male brains tend to be more linear than female brains. Female brains can do more things at once than male brains. Mothers are not surprise at that, because when you turn the little kid over for the dad to take care of, dads tend to go crazy doing things that mothers do routinely, in balancing all the stuff to make it happen.
Then another thing is, when we get ideas, we just don't send the new idea to one part of the brain to be processed. That's the way we used to think, and early brain researchers use to really wonder where different ideas are sent. When we have certain kinds of feelings/threats/erotic arousal, where do we send them for processing? The new theory suggests the brain function a little like a sparkler; you light the sparkler and the sparks go everywhere. Often times in unpredictable ways.
Positive Electron Transmission, or PET is where you put your brain in a machine and that machine tracks what happens in your brain while you are doing different things. One of the things they found from PETs is that after the brain gets the right answer, it doesn't stop. We use to think that the brain would get the right answer and then shut down, like a computer when it is done calculating something. Ask a question, computer computes, brain thinks, then "Bing," when the answer is found the computing/thinking stops. No way. Brains don't work like that.
Even after the brain gets the right answer it isn't satisfied, and it continues to look for other alternatives. Those alternatives may be looked for either at a conscious or unconscious level. Our brains love alternatives, and hate narrowness. However, classes are designed for narrowness. We are designing our learning environment exactly opposite from the way our brain works.
How can anybody live in the world of the millennium and not be fascinated about this? New understandings of how the brain functions is going to revolutionize the way we go about teaching and learning, if we really want to take it seriously. The problem is that lots more is being learned then we can deal with. The rights side of the brain is more active when the learner feels depressed, negative or stressed. The right side of the brain is also linked to unrealistic optimism.
This means that we can teach kids how to be optimistic. People can learn how to be optimistic. Why is that important? The reason it is important is the brain functions differently under stress, threat or helplessness, than it does when it is feeling cool. And your brain feels cool when you are optimistic. When the brain is feeling strong and robust, it functions much better than when it is under stress. When it is under stress it minimizes. I've talked before about how happy brains learn more than tired brain, fearful brain, or angry brains. This is just the same thing in more detail. When the brain is under threat it minimizes and goes into a knee jerk mode. It doesn't think much it just responds. It survives.
What are some of the threat conditions that minimize brain performance? Let's look at this list then weep. Potential physical harm from sources like classmates, staff, or family or other. Anytime you think there is potential physical harm your brain shuts down and goes into a minimal mode. If you have a kid in class that is constantly under threat from a bully, will he/she be learning? No, they won't. Are there lots of kids who feel physical threat in school, and home? Yes. Intellectual threats are the same: an idea of yours being attacked, or your potential being attack. If I say, "that's really a stupid answer," that moves the brain into a minimalist position. Anytime a teacher goes around saying to a kid, "you're stupid," you are putting the brain into a position of not being able to learn. A lack of information to meet the task requirements ("I don't know enough of how to do this.") is another threat that shuts you down.
Take, for example, when Americans go abroad and they get a bunch of strange money in their hand. A common response, when you want to buy a candy bar is to take a wad of money out of your pocket and hand it over and say "You pick what you need out of this." You just feel so helpless because you don't know how to transfer the information about your money to their money? You may even have the currency ratios, but you still can't think it through on the spot. The ability to translate the Euro dollar to the American dollar is easy because they are even now. But in India, 100 Rupees is worth 2 dollars. OK, that is simple enough: 100 rupees is worth 200 cents. But when it gets to be something that cost 30, 000 rupees, suddenly it gets to be tough to translate on the spot. (It is about 600 dollars.) Even if you know the number to translate, you sit there and feel helpless because you don't have the information to deal with the threat.
Then there are emotional threats. These are different from physical or intellectual. "I'm going to be embarrassed" is a good one. Or here is one that knocked my socks off when I heard it. Remember I told you that you control a class by creating privileges and then withdraw privileges? Well this new brain research says rewards can be as damaging as punishment. If you think you are under threat of not being able to get rewarded, ex: top person in class gets the prize, and you think "I can never be that top person" then that puts you under threat. The reward of the top person getting the prize can be a threat to you if you can't see how you can get it. Now I have to go back to the woodshed trying to figure out how to create rewards that are not threatning.
Then there are socio-cultural threats, disrespect, isolation, and the inability to persuade personal values. If I have a certain sets of values and I am in an environment where those values aren't appreciated, I have a hard time functioning. The environment is expecting me to function in a way that is inconstant with my personal values. That's a hard thing for me to deal with, trying for me to function in a way that my environment doesn't allow.
Finally, resource restriction is how deadlines are a threat in terms of resource restrictions. Example, the paper is due Friday, if you don't turn in the paper, you lose half credit. Now, we are guilty of providing deadlines in this class: if you don't get the quiz done by a certain date you can only get 18 instead of 21. Of course, our intention is to protect you from yourself, so you won't leave all your quizzes to the last day of the semester. But this brings up an interesting question: does this research imply that we should never have deadlines? Would anything ever get done? How would we reorganize education to minimize deadlines? Does it simply mean that deadline are ok as long as you are aware that students can't do their best work under those threats? That is how complex it is if you try to turn these principals into practice in terms of how you are going to teach.
Icons and Rituals of the Brain
Another thing that people suggest is the real importance of icons and symbols. Peripheral events in a learning environment are important; brain research is now suggesting that some of these things we sometimes laugh at (i.e. inspirational posters on the wall) have a good effect on the brain. The brain really likes to have inspirational posters, and other kinds of icons around.
Then there is something called reactive responses, which is also known as a survival response, or simply as a "hot button." Hot buttons are topics or behaviors that make us respond in a knee jerk way, something that teachers need to learn to control in themselves, but also something that they need to teach other people to control. These survival behaviors of the brain dominate and influence us in more ways than we think.
Brain research also suggests that all of our emotions need opportunities for expression. If you bottle them up, then you are shutting your brain down. Another way that the brain expresses itself is by following its privately developed rituals. For example, your daily routine is a ritual that your brain exercises because it has to. When you break your routine, you limit your brain's expression that shuts it down a bit. We all tend to put on one shoe before the other, and we all tend to dress in a specific order. Some people but their pants on first, while others put their shirts on first. These rituals turn out to be important parts of the way the brain function.
Brain-Based Behaviors that Teachers Try to Stop
Does anyone know what a tropistic behavior is? It is faddish or cliquish behavior. Example, buying Nike shoes, is a tropisitic behavior. Certain clicks are popular; some groups are in-groups. That's what fraternities are all about. That's what clubs are all about; there are in-groups and out-groups. This is all tropistic behavior. It turns out tropisitic behavior is something the brain really digs.
Preening, the brain needs preening. You need an opportunity to show yourself off. The brain loves to have meaningless discussion. The brain love informal debates on meaningless notation. Example, the endless discussion people have about sports. How people will really be influenced by who goes to the Super Bowl? I suppose the two teams that do, their families, die hard fans and owners, and of course the teams that don't. In all, a few hundred people. How many people are going to be talking about who goes to the super bowl? Millions. The sports folks have gotten this organized in better ways than the teachers have.
Informal role-play, and nested learning environments are all brain-based behaviors. Nesting is when an animal builds its own little house, and then peeks out over the top of it and looks at the world and feels comfortable inside its nest. We humans also like that. We want to have kind of our little nest, our comfort zone that we can call our own, and brains love that. Another kind of typical behavior is called top dog behavior. Or my stuff behavior. Another kind of brain behavior is flocking in teams. Flirting is another brain-based behavior.
The thing of it is, traditionally teachers spend a lot of time trying to combat these behaviors. That whole list is stuff teachers don't like, "stop flirting, stop this, stop that, stop the other thing" The question is can we create an environment which builds these behaviors rather than combating them. That means going about it in a completely different way. More personally meaningful projects under choice. Productive rituals, the absence of threats, and the absence of rewards that people think are beyond them. The absence of artificial deadlines. The prevision of the needed learning resources. All of these create a brain affirming learning climate.
It is very frustrating to people if you know computers are an important part of learning resources of this class, and you look all around you and see a whole lot of other folks who have computers in their home, and you don't have one. That's a threat. We try to provide for that threat by having computer labs on campus, but I am hear to tell you, going to do your work at a computer lab, ain't the same as having a computer at your house. That has to do with need learning resources.
If every child in the US had a laptop computer provided by their school, it would cost us about six billion dollars. That includes replacing it every year. That is really not very much money, on a national scale. We spent 10 billion dollars on Hurricane Floyd. Providing kids with learning sources is as important as cleaning up the mess after a hurricane.
We need to take positive learning rituals, and Jensen suggests some these. Arrival rituals, music and fan fair. A lot of societies have figured it out. In our society, at a football game what do you think it is all about to play the national anthem before the game? It is a ritual. Why don't you play the national anthem before a movie? Why should you play the national anthem before a sports game, and not before a movie? Why don't you go into a movie theater and everybody stands up and sings the national anthem? These are just, sheer rituals, nothing to do with anything real. Arrival rituals, fan fair, positive greetings, special handshakes, hugs, all of these are arrival rituals. Guests come to your home, and you welcome them with hugs, or handshakes or something you have as an arrival ritual. Organization rituals, team or class names. We are the monarchs. Cheers, jesters, different kinds of games. Situational rituals, applauds when learners contribute. Closing and ending rituals, journal writings, self-assessments. See all these possibilities. We really haven't figured out how to make these a positive part of education. If you don't do it right, it turns out dorky. If I were to say in a class "anytime someone answers a question well when I call on him or her, then everyone should applaud," that would be ridiculous.
That would probably work better if anytime someone succeeded, we all congratulated that person for their success. Like these positive thinking things, some of these informational things you see on TV where someone says something and everybody in the audience sits there, and claps, even though you know they are being paid to do it. You are influenced by the fact that when he says, "Aww, this thing slices and dices better than anything else" the audience goes "yeah." You know they are sitting there getting paid to go "yeah" but guess what? When you see this thing slicing and dicing and everybody going yeah, and then when they throw in the free whatever it is, you go and buy the stupid stuff.
My wife, who declares war on all this stuff, bought a George Foreman Grill. I couldn't believe it. We were one of the first kids on the block to have one of these George Foreman Grills that grills chicken on both sides simultaneously. You can now get them in the store, but when we got one the only place you could get them was from those infomercial with everybody going "yeah." It works very well incidentally. It was a good choice, but it's hard to clean.
Then one of the things that I have been saying since before I read Jensen's book, and I feel very good about this so I congratulate myself on this one, is the role of emotions in learning. Jensen equates this with reinforcement. Have you ever heard me mention the benefit of reinforcement? Just about 150 times (if not go back and read the lessons J). Learning must be reinforced in your dependent modality. Each of us has a dependent modality. Some of us like visual learning better, some like auditory learning better, some like kinetic learning better, and reinforcement must be customized to your own dependent modality. If you are a visual learner and you don't get any visual stimulus, you don't learn as well.
The frequency and the duration of the feedback produce something known as felt meaning. If you just learned something, like the meaning of the word tropistic, you now have a fact, but if you feel tropistic, i.e. when you understand what a fad is and have experienced going through one, then you have "felt" the meaning. That felt meaning will last a lot longer than the memorized meaning.
There is a guy who developed a special way of teaching foreign languages and he got absolutely phenomenal results. He could teach 500 vocabulary words, A DAY. Weeks later his students had 90% retention. 500 new foreign language words in one day, and weeks latter are able to remember 90% of them. What kid in Spanish one wouldn't die for that ability? It turns out, that if we just understood the process of learning a little better, it is within all of our brainpower to learn like that. We are just using a minuscule part of our brain.
The unit of knowledge is a fact, but the pattern of knowledge is what produces meaning. The unit of knowledge doesn't mean anything till you put them all together in a pattern. That produces real meaning. The kind of learning we have in school tends to be this piece meal, one fact at a time learning instead of putting it together for whole patterns.
The bottom line is that we need to create something called the receptive mind. This underlines the power of visual stimulation, music, and stories. Boy, I felt good when I saw that brain research supports the use of stories. You know how much I love stories. I think stories are one of the neatest ways to learn, and I've done that intuitively, and now brain research is telling me I'm right.
The final thing I'm going to mention is one of the things brain researchers are being kind of confused about: subliminal learning. Subliminal learning is learning that is designed to sneak up on you. Some people think if a teacher puts a poster up on the wall, and never mention it; the students will learn it subliminally. That isn't subliminal learning; that is peripheral learning. If the students just look up at the poster and see it, they have chosen to look and learn it. Subliminal learning is learning that sneaks up on you.
One of the kinds of subliminal learning is alter-light level learning. You project two images on the screen, one is bright, and the other is dim. People think they are looking only at the bright image, but in fact they are picking up information on the dim image as well, that's subliminal learning. Another one is high-speed flash projection. In the middle of the movie, and you've probably heard of people doing this, it turns out that if you flash an image, that is typically is 1/300th of a second, the eye will not see it, but the brain will register it. They have done experiments with ads in movies like that. If you flash an add for popcorn, and then stop for intermission, everyone goes and buys popcorn for no reason other than they now have popcorn on the brain. That's subliminal learning.
A third type of subliminal learning is something called variable insertion; I don't really understand this. But it's kind of like a flash card. If you take those little decks of cards, and flip through them and each picture changes just a little, and it creates a moving kind of something. That can be used to produce subliminal learning. Although, it isn't completely clear to me how it works. I understand the flash cards, but I don't understand how that relates to subliminal learning.
Shat you are hearing from me is that I am struggling to try and understand brain research and I have been working at it. I am still struggling to try and understand it and I don't. I admit I don't. I'm struggling. All I'm trying to do today is to invite you as perspective teachers, to try and participate in that struggle. There is lots of stuff in here that I am very confident is useful stuff.
How useful it is, what we should do with it, and how we should put it together, I really don't know. It seems to me it is important for you as perspective teachers to know about this. I argue in our teacher education committees that we probably ought to have a course on the neurology of learning as a part of teacher education. So far I haven't been successful in convincing anybody about having a course. One of the reasons that people are nervous about having such a course, is it's not quite clear what such a course would produce. I don't think it's clear what such a course would produce, but I think it's clear that we need to have teachers thinking about such things.
One of the things we are told by brain researcher is when you involve learners in the learning they learn more. It doesn't appeal to me at all to think we have to get everything figured out before we can start teaching it. I am very happy to share with you what I know, and share with you a lot of the stuff we are learning about that really confuses me. I don't try to hide that confusion; I'm not saying here is this wonderful new stuff we know exactly what to do with. I don't know what exactly to do with it. But we should all think about it, because it will make us better teachers.
For example, if you to think about the fact that the brain is a multiprocessor, and that it likes to operate on a lot of different levels simultaneously, that probably means that if I had some music in the background, some little things going up here, and some little things going on over there, we would have a more attractive learning environment. I don't know. It would be kind of wild to think that if we just had background music going the whole time that might produce more learning. I don't know.
They have also discovered that when people have control over their learning environment, they learn more. When I was dean of education at UMASS, I created one room where we took out all the chairs in the room, and we put carpet on the floor and scattered pillows around. It turned out that was the most popular room in the whole school. The teachers were just lined up to have classes in that room. Can you imagine having English 110 in a carpeted room with pillows around, with no desk in sight? The teacher has to sit on the floor leaning against the pillow, right along with everybody else.
Do you understand, that creates a different learning environment? I would personally like to have an environment that would have some comfortable chairs, and pillows on the floor. So the people who are chair type people can sit in the chairs, and people who are pillow type people can lie around on the floor. Why do you have to have one size that fits all? Most of you would not feel socially comfortable sitting in the middle of the isle, even if that were physically comfortable for you, because you would feel you might get criticized for it. You shouldn't feel criticized for anything that is reasonable within the learning environment that doesn't get in the way of other people learning. If you can rearrange you environment so it is more attractive to you, you should be encouraged to do it. Those kinds of negations make everybody feel involved with the learning environment. You have a stake in your space, rather than having a learning environment presented to you. Learning environments are crucial in terms of what learning takes place.